And with that, Scott Ludlam, Greens senator, announced what "the thing" was. He'd been taking the Queen's shilling - $199,000 last year - for nine years. And had never been entitled to a cent of it.

Advertisement

It's a thing, right? But hey.

Scott LudlamCredit:Alex Ellinghausen

He didn't know he was a dual citizen of both Australia and New Zealand way back in 2006 when he'd nominated for the Senate.

He'd not figured it out when he took his seat in July 2008.

It had never occurred to him in all the years since, nor had he thought, you know, to find out about it, even though he'd been born in New Zealand and didn't settle with his family in Western Australia till he was almost 9, which might have been a clue if you were in parliament and turned your attention for a minute to the constitution.

See, all along, there was this thing. The constitution. Section 44. Dual citizens aren't eligible to sit in parliament.

Scott Ludlam arrives at the surprise press conference in Perth on Friday to announce his resignation.Credit:Brendan Foster

If Ludlam had, say, done any other thing that he wasn't allowed to do - like, for instance, get a job that required a degree in engineering but forgot to check whether he'd actually passed the exams until nine years in, at which point, quelle horreur!, he discovered he'd flunked, his employer might yell fraud.

Or worse, if he'd been discovered, say, being the director of a company that had been trading while insolvent, even if he didn't know or had clean forgot he'd ever signed up - why, the hounds of hell would eventually come calling from administration firms, creditors, ASIC, the Taxation Office and maybe even the criminal courts.

The law's funny like that. And it usually wants you to pay back, with interest, what you weren't entitled to have been paid. Ignorance is no defence, even if you're a nice guy.

But hey. "It was recently brought to my attention," says Scott. Who, as anyone who's met him knows, is a nice guy. Just, hey, a bit ignorant in the personal bookkeeping department.

He doesn't want the thing to turn into a drawn-out legal stoush, he says.

You bet he doesn't, not after watching former Family First senator Bob Day and former One Nation senator Rod Culleton get their eligibility knocked on the head by the High Court so recently, even if both of those were for different reasons. High Court challenges can be both messy and expensive and very final.

Scott, who is actually quite smart, surely just wants this over as quickly as possible, before anyone starts talking about nine years of the Queen's shilling.

But hey, everyone!

What if Scott just went home for awhile, cooled his heels and renounced his New Zealand citizenship while The Greens chose a nice young fellow who thought that really, poor Scott had been the victim of cruel fate.

And say that nice young fellow then pulled the pin on himself and The Greens got to choose his replacement and it turned out to be….Scott Ludlam!